leggo Bhabha che legge Adrienne Rich

"The poet Adrienne Rich explores the kernel and substance of global minorities in Atlas of the difficult world (1991), one of the most striking poems dealing with the contemporary cosmopolitical world. Rich takes a global measure - a measure that is both moral and poetic - by decentering the place from which she speaks, and the location in which she lives. There is no ventriloquism or victimage here; non consensual cartography. Rich's resistance to such facile forms of identification and resolution comes from the relentless, repetitive power of her verse to reveal the profound "unsatisfaction" that dwells in our "shared" history of human civilization and barbarism. Anxiety links us to the memory of the past while we struggle to choose a path through the ambiguous history of the present. Such a restless apprehension about who one is - as an individual, a group or a community - and the complexities of forming a global perspective, are beautifully evoked in these few lines:



Memory says, want to do it right? Don't count on me...
I'm a canal in Europe where bodies are floating
I'm a mass grave I'm the life that returns
I'm a table set with room for the Stranger
I'm a field with corners left for the landless
I'm a man-child praising God he's a Man,
I'm a woman who sells for a boat ticket.
(...)
I'm an immigrant tailor who says A coat
Is not a piece of cloth only
..........................................
I've dreamed of Zion I've dreamed of world revolution
I'm a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin
A river in Mississippi. I am a woman standing
I am standing here in your poem: Unsatisfied.

The insistent repetition of the phrase - "I'm a/I'm a... I'm - as in some bleak counting song of a monstrous child of our times, finds itself both implicated in the traumatic events of global histories - slavery, war, migration, diaspora, peasant ribellions, revolution - and yet unsatisfied in its attempt to imagine how might stage a relationship to a world rendered restless by its transhistorical memories. Each line contains its own encrypted narrative: Rosa Luxenbourg may be the corpse dredged from the Landswehr canal in Berlin; the civil rights moment of the American South is invoked in the burning Mississippi. Rich struggles to find a way of establishing a narrative of human interest, in the sense that Arendt gives to the term: an exploration of what lies in-between (inter-est) these distinct, even disjunct moments that allow them to become affiliated with one another in the spirit of a "right to difference in equality". The repeated phrase - I am - a table... a field ... a man-child... a woman ... an immigrant"- does not seek to establish the sovereignty of a "representative" world-subject who can speak for all peoples.
In keeping with the spirit of the "right to narrate" as a means to achieving our own national or communal identity in a global world, demands that we revise our sense of symbolic citizenship, our myths or belonging, by identifying ourselves with the "starting-points" of other national and international histories and geographies, It is by placing herself at the intersections (and in the interstices) of these narratives that Rich emphasizes the importance of historical and cultural re-visioning: the process of being subject to, or the subject of, a particular history "of one's own" - a local history - leaves the poet unsatisfied and anxious about who she is, or what her community can be, in the larger flow of a transnational history. (...)
Citizenship as "standing" is testimony to her insistence that as active citizens we must vigilantly guard against the state's strategies of exclusion and discrimination in the midst of its promises of formal equality and procedural democracy".

I am a woman standing here, unsatisfied.

(Homi Bhabha, The location of culture, Routledge, New York, 1996: xix-xxi; foto: "Mappamondo" da Luna-Pac di Luigi Serafini, fino al 17 giugno al Pac di Milano).